"President Franklin D. Roosevelt, under enormous political and moral pressure, made "Negro History Week" official in the 1940s. It was conceived to teach the other Americans about the special contributions African Americans made to the development of our country. Special interests soon saw African American History Month as a vehicle to help achieve their political goals. Some struggled to make it a celebration wherein the African Americans would talk to themselves about themselves. Others set about making it a celebration of outstanding individuals. Few made a critical examination of the historical role played by the African American masses. It was a role seldom under their control." full: Nelson Peery http://www.lrna.org/league/PT/PT.1999.02/PT.1999.02.3.html Comment The Biography Channel aired the following stories in a row: The Patti Labelle, Gladys Knight, Nicholas Brothers and Dorothy Dandridge stories, with the Incolas brothers career spanning over seven decades. The Nicholas brother's parents and their parent's parents (grandparents) carry their history back into slavery. Individual history and personal narrative has always been important to me as authenticity slices of history. Marxism and the National Question does not disregard history as personal narrative but assigns itself another task. Or rather, personal narrative as agency breaths life into historical narrative. African American History Month presents an opportunity to describe the history of the African American people as a people, within the theory framework of what is called theoretical Marxism or the history outline described by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. The politics of Marxism is generally understood as political Leninism or the approach Vladimir Lenin used in assessing the national factor. Marxism and the National Factor in respects to the African American people would seems to mean a materialist conception of the development of the means of production, or the productive forces, with the property relations within and the evolution of the African American people - as a people, within this framework. To suggest that African American History is the heart of American history, causes eyebrows to rise and seem a contradiction. African Americans have always been looked upon and treated as if they were at best on the periphery of our country's history and here is the essence of the tension within the Marxism that creates the political and theory conception called Marxism and the Negro Question or in the era of Empire ("globalization") "African American Liberation and Social Revolution." This tension within Marxism and the Negro Question ("African American Liberation and Social Revolution") expresses a certain accidental form of our history in as much as the industrial classes of the North were in fact formed from successive waves of European immigrants. A point of view from within the formation of the industrial classes of the North would of course view the slave and their descendant on the periphery of their formation as history and as a historical class. Marxism as insurgent politics, with an underlying theory grid, acquired its shape and articulation in relationship to successive boundaries in the growth, expansion, evolution and finally decay of the industrial mode of production or what is called the era of "post industrial society." The African American National Factor is subject to the laws of development of the productive forces, with the property relations within and reveals these laws in an acute way. This is the economic and political meaning of stating that African American History is the heart of American history. The point of view from within the industrial proletariat of the North is historically inaccurate for several reasons. In as such as everyone agrees that the Northern states evolved and grew as an appendage to the Southern plantation system, manufacturing the necessities for the slave system, the social position of the African American people cannot be described as being on the periphery of the history of the American Union. Without slavery . . . . >From this point of view of the actual working and growth of the productive forces, it becomes easier to see why the control, manipulation and exploitation of the African American was at the heart of every major and most minor decisions of the state prior to the Civil War and a good many of them afterwards. The issue of viewpoint and tension within Marxism and the National Factor deepens as we move back in history and reveal our collective historical error. The proposition that the industrial proletariat is or was the grave digger of the bourgeoisie has been refuted by history and was always theoretically incorrect. The real problem of political Marxism in America has been its mandate to organize the real proletarian masses - the most poverty stricken thrown into conflict with the state, while having to orient itself to the spontaneous movement. In one period of our history a dynamic sector of the industrial proletariat was in motion. This period is identified as the industrial unionism movement or the transition from craft to industrial unions. This political boundary of our history - industrial unionism, peaked around 1953, during the ascendency of the reform movement to shatter and overthrow Jim Crow. This social movement to reform and desegregate American society was fueled or occurred as the result of changes in the means of production - mechanization of agriculture. Mechanization of agriculture and desegregation meant the African Americans rapidly became an integral part of the industrial working class, although a section had been farm laborers and industrial workers for a very long time. Unfortunately, the section of the working class they were becoming part of was the most unskilled, which was being eliminated. The last stage of labor saving devices was eliminating the common laborer - as they were constituted between the period of the rise of Fordism and the early 1960s, which in turn had been the entry point of African Americans into the industrial working class. In his remarkable and historically profound book, "The Strange Career of Jim Crow," C. Vann Woodward points out: "In 1964 automation was wiping out some 40,000 unskilled and semi-skilled jobs a week, and since blacks were disproportionately employed in such jobs they bore the brunt of technological displacement. The rate of unemployment among them ran twice or more than that among whites. None of these acute problems was essentially touched by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965." (page 192, Third Revised Edition) This technological displacement was capture in the saying "last hired and first fired" and the bourgeois nationalists and those captive to this ideology understood this displacement as white racism and could not accurately chart the technology advance to come. Again from the standpoint of the industrial proletariat during the 1920s -- (the period of formulation of the Negro Question as a National Colonial Question); the specific boundary of our industrial system and the history of our working class in the North; most communists could not distinguish between the African American people as a people and the South as a national question where the majority of blacks resided. Further, on the basis of its own social motion, the idea that the industrial proletariat was charged by history to overthrow capital became the dominant ideology of the industrial warriors, communists and socialist alike. This ideology is called political syndicalism. The puzzle deepens if one considers the African American National Factor from the standpoint of the continuous revolutionizing of the form of the labor process in the American Union. "From the fields to the factory to the streets" describes more than the color factor in American history. What is being described is the technological advance and it is this advance that Marx speaks of in the Communist Manifesto and calls the grave digger of the bourgeoisie . . . the victory of the proletariat is the inevitable historical consequence of this advance. Within the framework of political syndicalism, theoretical American Marxism viewed African American history as periphery to American history. Various theories of white racism prevented a generation from grasping the technological advance and it impact and altering of the character of the African American Liberation struggle. >From the standpoint of Marxism and the National Question, as understood by the group of industrial workers I was a part of in Detroit, the African American people are not and have never been a nation within the American Union, or rather America has never consisted of a dominant white nation of people and classes characteristic of a modern industrial society, along side a black nation of people and classes. Rather, the American Union consists of various national formations roughly corresponding to "the North," "The South" and "the Southwest," with various grouping of Indian nations (in the old usage of the term nation) held together by a multinational state system. The President's Commission on Civil Disorder reported in 1968 that "Our Nation is moving towards two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal." The question is, "does this characterize America almost forty years later?" Stated from a more or less Marxist standpoint, is the current political and economic polarization in our society between blacks, with all the modern classes amongst them and whites, with all the modern classes amongst them? Is it accurate to conceive of the oppressing peoples as simply all whites and all blacks as constituting the oppressing people in respects to African American Liberation and Social Revolution? In my opinion such an idea and approach is wrong when viewing the entire multinational state of the American Union. Waistline
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